The Culture Factory

Architecture and the Contemporary Art Museum

Richard J Williams

• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781848223981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This book explores the key battlegrounds in the design of the contemporary-art museum, describing the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics at the highest levels, and the commitment of states, cities and wealthy individuals to the display of art. It describes museum building as the projection of political power, but also as a desire to acquire power. It is commonplace to assume that the contemporary-art museum has become ever more spectacular, and the place of art ever more subservient within it. This book argues that a tendency to spectacle coexists with another equally powerful tendency, to make art museums that celebrate the artistic process, typically attempting to recreate the feeling of the artist's studio. Richard J. Williams's stimulating text includes many historical examples to illustrate how we got to where we are now, from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, London's Tate Modern, Oscar Niemeyer's work in Brazil and beyond, and the 798 Art District in Beijing.

Chapter 1

How did we get here?

This is a book about art museums, with very little art in it. That, and others of the book’s choices, will no doubt strike some readers as perverse. But the recent history of contemporary art shows that we need an expanded idea of what the museum could be. There is an ever more capacious understanding of what art is, as well as an ever-greater acceptance on the part of museums that they are inescapably part of what might be called the entertainment complex, together with audiences whose growth has been largely untroubled by these questions. Art museums, to use a concept that threads all the way through this book, have become industries. To those who wish to defend art’s exceptionalism, or the art museum as a bulwark against the world, these trends are only cause for regret. This is not a regretful book, however, even if the trends I describe point to – as I suspect they do – the dissolution of art as a meaningful category and art museums as meaningfully distinct institutions.¹ Institutions merely represent the priorities of the societies that produce them, so we get mainly what we deserve. But we need to understand what we have and how we got here, and that is the point of the book.

Some of the museums I discuss are indubitably there for art: New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for example, later in this chapter. But there are also admittedly museums of design, museums of history, museums of urban life and museums of not very much at all. Even among art museums, however, there are questions. The extraordinary Guggenheim Bilbao, designed by the architect Frank Gehry and opened to global acclaim in 1997, is ostensibly for art. But prod the Guggenheim, figuratively speaking, and what shakes out is less an art museum in a traditional sense than an entertainment complex at the heart of a giant project of urban regeneration. The Guggenheim Bilbao, as we will see in Chapter 3, is, from the perspective of its consumers, just one of an array of leisure options, only some of which have to do with art. That is an observation, not a criticism, for without museums like the Guggenheim we would not have the radically expanded audience for contemporary art that we now have, all over the world.² But with these relatively new institutions, promoting and housing contemporary art, has come an unprecedentedly broad understanding of what art is. As well as paintings, sculptures and drawings, a regular visitor to Tate Modern – to pick one example – may have seen various species of installation, film, street photography, photojournalism, dance, advertising, industrial design, psychedelic lightshow, city plan and data visualization, and will have likely heard lectures, gone shopping, lunched and drank.³ And, as the art theorist Boris Groys has stated, even where museums are ostensibly art-focused, they have increasingly shown documentation of art events (performances, installations, social interventions) that have happened elsewhere.⁴ Ours is a period of ‘accelerated erasure of visible differences between artwork and profane object’, he has written, and artworks depend ever more on context in order to be understood as artworks.

The boundaries between the experience of art and other experiences have certainly become porous, and the same can be said of the boundaries between ostensibly different kinds of museums. The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, discussed in Chapter 3, is a museum of history on the face of it. But its building, designed by the media-savvy Polish American architect Daniel Libeskind, is a highly sculptural form with arguably more in common with Land Art than any traditional form of museum. Its displays, meanwhile, short on objects and long on immersive ‘experience’, are more easily understood as belonging to the history of installation art than exhibition design.⁵ Some readers may disagree, but it seems to me that the IWM North is, like it or not, not much less an art experience than Tate. In the newly expanded world of the contemporary art museum, the distinction between what is and what is not art arguably matters little to visitors too.

If they are preoccupied with this question, visitors seem content that the ‘art’ component of a museum visit may well lie in the architecture. Architecture has always been an art, of course, but the period from the end of the 20th century saw it defined as art with renewed vigour. The American art critic and historian Hal Foster went on to describe this re-emergence of art in architecture as the ‘art-architecture complex’. His argument, in short, was that in a world driven by capital, any cultural form needed to be big to get attention. Big buildings were, in other words, the authentic cultural form of big capital. It did not especially matter what the buildings were for, but museums were superb candidates for this role: prestigious, expensive, centrally placed, capable of almost any imaginable form.⁶ There was scarcely a better platform for this reinvented art form, and the images it has put into circulation in the world have become globally famous. You may not have visited the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but you certainly know what it looks like, along with the Centre Pompidou or Tate Modern. Sometimes these buildings have become a shorthand for the cities they occupy, for they have certainly been a shorthand for the way global capital circulates in the world. The drawing that accompanies the Financial Times’s daily leader column depicts a set of iconic buildings in a worldwide collage: the house newspaper of global capital makes architecture capital’s material form.

Museums, particularly art museums, underwent an unprecedented boom period at the end of the 20th century, resulting in new audiences, new architectural forms and new roles. The boom was sometimes financed by new sources of capital: in the case of the UK, state-run lotteries that redistributed wealth to prestige projects, and new types of borrowing by public authorities based on projections for real-estate growth. Museums became central to urban development. ‘What city can aspire to world-class status without a museum of contemporary art?’, wrote the art theorist Martha Buskirk.⁷ For Buskirk, museums were just the most visible symbol of contemporary art’s absorption by the so-called creative economy. That economy, a way of accounting for and industrialising creative work, was of immense interest to governments and urban leaders in the early part of the 21st century, popularised by the American urban studies theorist Richard Florida and others, for whom the production of art was merely one of innumerable new (and potentially profitable) possibilities in the creative economy. So inseparable had art become from such thinking, Buskirk wrote, it had entirely restructured what both art and museums might be.

That argument is important here: my imagination of the contemporary art museum, like Buskirk’s, is one inescapably conditioned by the creative economy. There might be odd points of resistance here or there – museums that set themselves apart from the world in some way, typically (like the Louisiana museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, or the Yorkshire Sculpture Park complex in England) by placing themselves at some remove from the city. That pastoral tradition, generally supported by private capital, is an important part of former museum director Charles Saumarez Smith’s account of contemporary museums, The Art Museum in Modern Times.⁸ It is not, however, central to my story, which is focused on the role – whether we like it or not – of museums in the creative economy. That economy demands museums that are visibly part of the modern world, industrial in their organisation and located in the places – cities – of maximum traffic.

If the industrialisation of art museums fed off the creative economy, it also had to do with the development of the so-called experience economy, defined in 1998 by Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, who described a market in experiences that had superseded that of ordinary goods and services.⁹ Although subject to debate, the theory did provide a way to understand the increasing appeal of art museums: if consumers were less attracted to the accumulation of things, museums provided a vehicle for memorable experiences. It also helped explain the changing form of museums themselves, less directed to fixed objects, such as paintings, and more towards theatrical experiences, such as film and performance.¹⁰ The development of Tate Modern is a case in point, not only for its gigantic Turbine Hall, a space whose dimensions simply dwarf ordinary art forms, but for its more recent Tanks, whose existence is justified largely on performance.

These things suggest a decisive move away from the so-called ‘white cube’ model of exhibition space, and some readers will notice how little that kind of space features in the main part of this book. The term originates from a series of influential articles by the artist-critic Brian O’Doherty for the American magazine Artforum, originally published in 1976 and later collected as a book entitled Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.¹¹ The white cube was a fiction, but a compelling one that perfectly described many gallery visitors’ experience of contemporary art spaces in the 1970s. Its architectural structure and origins might be irrelevant – in New York, O’Doherty’s home, the white cube could occupy a former industrial space, like the Paula Cooper Gallery, or an Upper East Side townhouse gallery, like Leo Castelli’s, or it could equally be one of the rooms of the original Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Stone in 1937 and inaugurated in 1939). Its character, regardless of these origins, was the exclusion of anything redolent of the outside world from the contemplation of the art. The white cube was a sealed space, at least in the imagination. Antiseptic and minimally decorated, it was conceived to provide the least distraction from the art. In probably the best-known passage, O’Doherty wrote, ‘the work is isolated from everything that would detract from its evaluation of itself … Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of aesthetics.’¹²

O’Doherty got plenty of attention for his argument, for he provided a blueprint for the white cube, as well as setting it up as a punchbag. It had something for everyone, although O’Doherty’s sympathies were certainly with the white cube’s critics. The same year the articles were published, Artforum ran an extended, lavishly photographed treatment of Rooms at PS1, an abandoned primary school (hence ‘PS’) in the down-at-heel borough of Queens, titled ‘the Apotheosis of the Crummy Space’. It indicated that the magazine thought the future of contemporary art might lie in decidedly messier, less determined spaces.¹³

The white cube nevertheless persisted as an ideal and an aspiration, and the much-emulated work of the architect Richard Gluckman for New York’s Dia Foundation indicates its enduring appeal. It can be found in the cool refinement of museums such as the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York, designed by Tokyo-based practice SANAA, the new galleries designed by Yoshio Taniguchi for MoMA in 2004 and the extensive work of the British architect David Chipperfield – for example his buildings for the Hepworth in Wakefield or for Turner Contemporary in Margate. It could also refer to the incorporation of minimally designed spaces in outwardly very different museums, from the Guggenheim Bilbao by Frank Gehry to Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern. (Art dealer Jay Jopling’s London-based commercial gallery appropriated both the title of O’Doherty’s essay and the form it described.)

It would certainly be possible to write a history of the contemporary art museum focused on the persistence of the white cube, a history that might draw attention to the sheer difficulty of realising its effects – those even shadow lines at the junction between wall and floor are notoriously hard to get right. But such an account would avoid the main battlegrounds in the recent history of museums: the elevation of architecture as a form of contemporary art in its own right, the seemingly inexorable rise of their spaces of circulation, the cultivation of spectacle. All these things suppose the increasingly ‘theatrical’ character of contemporary art, to use a still-relevant term first deployed by the critic Michael Fried back in 1967 (he deplored it – art should be kept as pure as possible and as separate from any other arts, let alone any forms of popular culture).¹⁴

These battlegrounds suppose that contemporary art museums regard themselves – and are also regarded by their consumers – as embedded in their surrounding cultures, rather than defensively aloof. This can be seen in the architectural schemes of the new museums. How often they now provide viewing platforms from which the surrounding landscape is framed as an opportunity for photographs, or perhaps real estate development, imaginary or otherwise. Renzo Piano’s 2014 Whitney Museum in New York is a case in point. Almost its entire eastern elevation is given over to a cruise-ship-like superstructure, with no less than three floors of viewing decks looking over the whole of lower Manhattan. Meanwhile, the western face, its metaphorical ship’s bridge, is defined by a vast picture window looking across the Hudson River to the passing vessels and the rising skyscrapers of the Jersey shoreline (fig.1). With these things in mind, Saumarez Smith wrote in 2021 that it was the ‘model of the contemporary art museum’, a building ‘designed with the urban flaneur in mind’.¹⁵ The Whitney is fully a part of its environment, you might say, an active agent in it.

That engagement with the environment is represented too in the effective dissolution of boundaries inside the museum between (fine) art and popular culture. Art is just one point on a continuum of consumption, a fact underlined in bold by the New York Guggenheim’s exhibition The Art of the Motorcycle in 1998, instigated by the museum’s then director, the expansion-minded, culturally omnivorous, motorcycling Thomas Krens.¹⁶ If this is right, museums – at least our largest and most public ones – seem to have abandoned the idea of art as a uniquely refined cultural practice and are relaxed about its accession to the world of the creative economy, to an essentially industrial understanding of art.

MOMA

But how did we get to where we are? This book takes two starting points, obvious ones perhaps, and canonically western ones too, but there are no better examples of the industrialisation of the art museum with all its attendant dangers and potential. They are the Centre Pompidou in Paris, opened in 1977, which embodies in embryonic form almost all contemporary thinking about art museums, and before that the Museum of Modern Art in New York, founded in 1929. MoMA is important ideologically, for here was the industrial imagination embedded ...